74

To: HIS MOTHER

Published:
First published in 1929 in the journal ProletarskayaRevolyutsiya No. 6.
Sent from Shushenskoye to Podolsk.
Printed from
the original.
Source:Lenin
Collected Works,
Progress Publishers,
1977,
Moscow,
Volume 37,
pages 230-232.
Translated: The Late George H. Hanna
Transcription\Markup:D. MorosPublic Domain:
Lenin Internet Archive.
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display and perform this work, as well as make derivative and
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February 3, 1899

Today, Mother dearest, I am sending you the last two
parts of my “markets”, Chapters VII and VIII, and two
Appendices (II and
III)[2] and the headings of the last
two chapters. At last I have finished a work that at one
time had threatened to drag on infinitely. I would ask
Anyuta to send them on to the writer as soon as possible
together with the enclosed review of Gvozdyov’s book. The
writer sent me the book “for review” and I thought it would
be awkward to refuse from here. But I did not enjoy writing
the review. I did not like the book—nothing new,
generalities, an impossible style in places (he writes about
“connivances at farming” and things like that). He is at the same
time a supporter and an opponent of the Narodniks and,
most important of all, a Nachalo collaborator. Little as
I like that “Samara”
spirit,[1]
I nevertheless decided to
restrain myself and fill up four-fifths of the review with
remarks against the Narodniks and one-fifth against
Gvozdyov. I do not know whether the editors will like it; I do not
know their relations with the “Samarans”. Nadya is writing
to the écrivain’s wife about all this today.

Notes

[2]This refers to the appendices to Chapter VII of The Development
of Capitalism in Russia—“Table of Statistics on the Factory
Industry of European Russia” and “The Chief Centres of Factory
Industry in European Russia” (see Collected Works, Vol. 3. pp.
601–02 and 603–07).